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Comment by lumberjack24 | Hacker News Reader

The access model on platforms like GitHub is flawed, a single account can be used for both professional and personal projects/repositories, leading to “fat finger” errors like this one here...

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Oh yes this. It's so easy to critically fuck up an invite into an organisation. If you get typo the username you are potentially compromised. I've seen a couple of near misses on this already.

Note: the invite input box actually autocompletes ALL github usernames.

> Note: the invite input box actually autocompletes ALL github usernames.

I'm sorry, but that's wild. That's like, not even an easy engineering problem to solve necessarily, given their size!

Not really. They only have 83-90 million users. That's not really a big table, at least in my world...

In my world 20 is a lot because finding customers is hard... :(

It blew my mind after upgrading to enterprise that was still how it worked.

Sorry, but string prefix search over a few hundred million entries is something you can do with the same performance using just postgres on a single server with just a few hours of dev time.

I've done it before, it's not as impressive as it seems.

With trigrams you can even do precise substring search on this scale with good performance.

If you'd like, I can build a small demo.

Lol no thanks, once you hit the server I’m good, it’s more about the UI for me.

You can invite by email addr, so the workaround here is only invite corporate email addresses.

If the target user hasn't added their corp email to their profile then they can't be part of the org.

This is what I do but I really wish there was a better integration with auth providers and could use it for the invite. Would be nice to search my directory to type the email and confirm the name matches the email.

This is what GitLab does with their hosted AD/LDAP connector.

I’m in fear of mistyping something and inviting the wrong person.

So never type an email address in at all. Go to an extent email message, copy the bloke's email address, then paste it into the Github interface.

This can be vulnerable to "ticket trick" - often support/helpdesk sites are put on the main domain and have reply-to email addresses that will reflect the content back to the user requesting support. This can be used to sign up for slack, etc.

Org can be configured with SSO which would require Org members to login with your Co auth in order to access the Org.

Though it would still allow "collaborators" which don't have SSO requirement.

Absolutely this!

The fact that no one bats an eye that GitHub is used to store proprietary source code is so surprising to me. Conversely if that is what it is meant for, why does it default to autocompleting to all users globally instead of my org (even on the enterprise version.) why hasn’t this been fixed for years.

I don't see how this is related to GitHub's access model. Was the canonical Toyota repo even on GitHub?

Not really? You shouldn't be checking in secrets, period.

You shouldn't, but clearly people make this mistake all the time. I caught one last week. Security in depth is valuable.

Checkout github enterprise managed users, all the shiny of github.com with the benefits from the self hosted github

Do you have a source that this is a "fat finger" error?

I've had contractors publish my code to public Github repos to showcase their work for their next job. Even after emailing them multiple times, I kept finding my code in github with companies emailing me asking for a referral to this person...

I don't think it is flawed.

You cannot access org's repos without VPN

if you create a new repo by mistake outside your org, then uhh..., it's crazy?

it's like sending email with credentials to people outside your org

On github.com you don't need VPN to access your org's repos. You're referring to github enterprise (the self hosted version).

I do use github.com and I cannot access some repos unless I connect to VPN

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